


Silver for Monsters

by rhetoricalrogue



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, Detective Noir, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 12:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8844583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhetoricalrogue/pseuds/rhetoricalrogue
Summary: Dames were trouble, of that Eskel was certain, and sorceresses doubly so.  A late night visitor proves him right, pulling him into an investigation in the heart of Novigrad City.  With his friend wanted for a murder she didn't commit and the killer still out for blood, will he be able to solve it before someone winds up burnt at the stake?





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story may look familiar to anyone who followed along on my Tumblr while I wrote this for NaNoWriMo 2015. I've let it sit for a year and I think it's finally ready for some edits. The story itself may be complete, but I want to play around with additions and plot points that I didn't have time during the month I wrote this to explore in detail. Updating may be irregular because of this.

There were two things in life that were certain: death and taxes. Eskel sighed over the ledger book he had taken from Vesemir’s desk and tapped his pencil thoughtfully against his chin. _Might need to update that saying,_ he thought as he looked at the pile of mail stacked in front of him. _Bill collectors coming in to get their due is another certainty._ The electricity bill alone was through the roof, and the water bill was astronomical. Then again, he guessed that was to be expected of a dump like Kaer Morhen. The ancient building had definitely seen better days and while the rent might be dirt cheap, the wiring was shot, the radiators never properly heated a room in the winter, and certain areas upstairs had places on the floors that you did _not_ want to step on for fear of falling through.

On the positive side, at least he was getting some experience fixing things around the joint. He now had more than basic carpentry skills under his belt, and Eskel wasn’t modest enough not to crow at the nice little additions he’d made here and there. The downside was that aside from Vesemir, he was the most experienced of the four men living in the building when it came to fixing plumbing issues. Eskel shuddered as he remembered a time he rushed in to a bathroom with Lambert bare-assed naked, cursing a blue streak and trying to rinse shampoo out of his eyes as water from the broken showerhead sprayed everywhere.

As funny as it was in hindsight, it was a sight that Eskel never particularly wanted to revisit again.

He flipped through the ledger book and scanned the numbers in their bank account. They were doing _all right_ , meaning that they could afford to go out and eat a few times a month as a break from canned soup and Lambert’s questionable noodles, but it would be nice to pad the numbers and get some well-needed breathing room. The roof was going to be needing replacing at some point, and they only had so many pots and pans to use to catch leaks when it rained. Vesemir was always going on with his pipe dream of gutting out the entire pile and starting over from scratch, but Eskel would just settle for making sure the ground floor was actually up to code for once.

And as much as he would have liked it to, money didn’t grow from trees. If he wanted to start on any of those improvements, it would mean taking on more jobs. To some, more jobs meant more money, but in their case, taking on more contracts meant taking on extra expenses, especially on Geralt’s end. Eskel frowned. Silver bullets were _not_ cheap to manufacture and his best friend went through them like a thirsty man goes through water when he went after the big contracts. Vesemir had been melting down any piece of sliver he could get his hands on to mold new bullets, but forks and knives could only go so far before they had to pony up and buy the real deal. At the rate they were going, it would be more cost-effective to dust off the silver swords they had hanging on various walls of Kaer Morhen just to make ends meet.

Eskel had to shake his head and huff out a breath of laughter at the idea. Vesemir would probably be the only one to actually follow through with that suggestion, seeing as he was the most traditional of them all. While he still practiced with the blades that had been his bread and butter for so many years to keep his skills and reflexes sharp, Eskel hadn’t gone out into the field with a sword in decades. Geralt was the same way. Once firearms became more advanced, he’d been the first one of them to ditch the dual swords and go with something easier to conceal. And forget about getting Lambert on board with that idea. These days, the youngest witcher in Kaer Morhen wouldn’t be caught dead in public with anything that would break the line of his greatcoat.

With a sigh, Eskel’s eyes strayed from the ledger and its red ink to the stacks of manila files littering his desk. Geralt and Lambert usually sank their teeth into the bigger contracts, but Eskel did his best to take on the smaller ones that came their way. Their pay wasn’t as big as slaying a griffin or ridding a neighborhood of werewolves, but dispatching drowners in the sewers and necrophages on the outskirts of cities made traveling easier. Easier travelling meant more business. More business meant more customers, and more customers eventually equaled to more money being poured into a town. The jobs he took weren’t as glamorous as his brothers-in-arms were after, but Eskel made a point to make his face memorable to the powers that be so that when similar jobs cropped up, his name would be the first one on their minds. He’d also had a way of convincing mayors and city councilmen of the economic opportunities that his trade opened up for them, and they paid him handsomely for his troubles.

He grunted, going back to the budget and adding in the monthly grocery allowance. Too bad many of the other townspeople didn’t see it that way. To them, he and others of his profession were merely fancy rat catchers, exterminators who were looked down upon and spat at as they passed in the street. It was always like that, ever since he could remember. He and Geralt were pushing a hundred years old, and Vesemir was far older than the both of them combined. Lambert was the youngest out of the four of them and the chip on his shoulder at being dealt this hand in life still hadn’t had a chance to wear down to begrudging acceptance like it had for Eskel. Out of the four, he was the roughest to work with due to his prickly personality, but the fact that Lambert was quick to get a job done and was damned good at what he did usually offset his customer service skills.

Setting the budget book aside, Eskel opened up one of his files. It was late; he should be getting some sleep, especially if he was supposed to get up early and tail these two. The Kaer Morhen Detective Agency had been pretty strapped for cash recently, which meant that Eskel had taken on a few non-monster contracts like the one in front of him. It was the typical investigative fodder: the wife had approached him with worries that her husband had strayed. The down payment on his services had been so much that he’d been able to afford a new radiator for his aging Scorpion sedan. Geralt had teased him for holding onto a vehicle for so long, but he and his Scorpion were buddies. That car had seen him through too many scrapes and narrow misses to ever get rid of, or at least not until the car companies saw fit to make a similar model. It might not be as flashy as the Vauxhall Wyvern Lambert drove, but it was dependable, which was something Eskel valued over style any day.

He was in the middle of looking over his notes when the door to their office opened. Looking up, Eskel drew in a low breath and automatically went into Detective Mode. A woman of medium height and build, dark hair spilling over her shoulders, dressed elegantly in silver and black. His nose twitched: lilac and gooseberries. Every instinct he had told him this dame was trouble, and he had experience to back those instincts up.

“Yennefer,” he said, standing up from his chair. “Surprised to see you here.”

She closed the door behind her. “I’d love to trade pleasantries, Eskel, but I desperately need to find Geralt.”

He frowned. “What do you need him for this time? Find another djinn to ruin a village over, or did some people start spreading rumors about you again and you need him to set them straight?” Alright, so the last part was a low blow, but Eskel had heard enough tales, both from Geralt himself and secondhand through Dandelion’s stories to not like the woman on principle. He wasn’t about to change his feelings for her until he saw for his own eyes how she and Geralt acted together. And since that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, well, his opinion wasn’t going to change either.

She straightened up, her violet eyes flashing in anger. “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.” She walked towards him, her heels clicking on the linoleum tile. “I’m prepared to wait.”

“He isn’t here,” he said, sitting back down. He should have offered her one of the rickety guest chairs to sit in, but he didn’t. It was ungentlemanly of him, but he didn’t give a damn.

“And where is he?”

“Out.”

She took a breath as if she was about to lay in on him, but then held it and slowly let it out again in an admirable show of restraint. “All right. Do you know _where_ ‘out’ he might be?”

“It’s hard to say. Last time I heard from him, he and Vesemir were traveling south, towards White Orchard.” He leveled a look at her. “Apparently, Geralt received a letter from _you_ and went out looking.” He remembered that night. Geralt had picked up the perfumed letter and ripped open the envelope faster than he’d ever seen his friend react to a letter before. He’d scanned the contents before heading towards his room and packing up a bag. Vesemir wasn’t about to let him storm off all by himself, so at least there was _someone_ with him to act as the voice of reason. “Odd that you show up here when he’s out looking for you. Could have saved a lot of time and trouble if you’d done that in the first place.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and Eskel had a momentary pang of regret for the way he’d been talking to her. He’d always been a sucker for a woman in distress. “I couldn’t wait where I was. It wasn’t safe any longer. When did he leave?”

“Three days ago.” He did the travel times in his head. If they drove with Geralt pushing his Roach Motors until they absolutely had to stop for gas, then they’d be close to White Orchard about now. “You might catch him if you hurry.” Eskel flexed his wrist in front of him, miming the way he’d often seen other sorceresses summon portals.

She nodded. “Thank you for your help,” she said. “I know you probably haven’t heard much good about me, but I do appreciate it.”

He was going to say something to her on the lines of asking her to stop stringing his best friend around like a sad little puppy, but he stopped himself at the last minute. Geralt was an adult who could make his own bad decisions. While he was one of his friends and the closest thing he had to a brother, he didn’t need Eskel fighting his battles for him. “Just be careful,” he said instead. Everyone had always described Yennefer as a woman who was cool and unflappable. To see the troubled look on her face probably meant that whatever she needed Geralt for was important.

Important and dangerous. He glanced over at Geralt’s cluttered desk and knew that he’d have to take one the unfinished contracts he had out if they wanted to get paid for them before someone else from another Witcher school snapped them up from under their noses.

Yennifer nodded. “How…” she swallowed. “How was he?” she asked.

“Worried. Mostly for you, I’d think.”

The troubled expression smoothed out at his words and the smallest of smiles graced her lips. If Eskel didn’t know any better, he would have thought that the sorceress really _did_ have feelings for Geralt and was pleased that he was so concerned about her. “Thank you,” she said, turning back towards the door. Eskel stood out of habit, his wolf head tie clip vibrating against his chest as the air outside the hallway changed, the portal she had conjured making Eskel’s ears pop.

He sat back down and ran a hand over his face. “Friggin’ dames,” he muttered. Reaching across his desk, he picked up his coffee mug and stared at it in distaste. The half-finished contents had gone stone cold and were undrinkable. Hell, the entire thing had been undrinkable from the start: it had been Lambert’s turn to make the coffee for the day and he usually messed around with the ratio of grounds to water, causing the finished product to be strong and bitter. Eskel took his mug and poured what was still in it out in the potted ficus tree. The poor tree probably needed actual water instead of too strong coffee, but that was all it was going to get until tomorrow, or whenever he remembered to tend to it. Vesemir would probably kill him if anything happened to that plant. He’d been babying it for some time, especially after Geralt had poured a potion in it just to see what would happen and it had withered almost to the point of death.

He stretched and eyed the half-full carafe on the warmer in the corner. It had been sitting there for hours, the contents concentrating to something that resembled tar. Curling up his lip in distaste, he flicked the warmer off. It really was late, and he _did_ have that stakeout case to work on in the morning. Not bothering to cover the yawn that stretched his mouth wide, he scratched at his stomach and went back to his desk to flick off the lamp.

His tie clip vibrated again, this time hard enough to almost yank itself out of his shirt. The air around the office grew still and the sudden change in pressure caused the office door to slam open, turning over the rack his coat and fedora were hanging on.

“ _Damnit, Yennefer_ ,” he started, yellow eyes narrowing in irritation. “I _told_ you, Geralt’s not…” He stopped when a figure stumbled out of the hastily drawn portal, her legs giving out from under her. He rushed to her side as she fell, catching her before she could hit her head on the floor. As soon as she was clear of the portal, it snapped closed and vanished.

This was _not_ Yennefer. The slight woman with disheveled hair wearing nothing but a flimsy cotton nightgown stained with soot was someone he hadn’t seen in years. “ _Marle?_   What’s going on?”

She looked up at him and his heart lodged in his throat at the bloody gash that ran across her cheek. More blood was caked at her ear and down her throat, staining the neck of her gown. “The Church of Eternal Fire…” She leaned against him, her body shaking in his arms.

“Oh, _damnit_.” The Church had been going after witches for quite some time. “I _told_ you to get out of Novigrad. I told you it wasn’t safe.” Marle wasn’t much of a sorceress, but apparently someone had seen through her simple herbalist storefront and reported her to the authorities.

“They think I killed a man,” she rasped, her big grey-blue eyes wide with fear. She pulled herself into a sitting position, and for the first time, Eskel saw that her trembling hands were bloody, dark red staining her palms and underneath her fingernails. “Melitele save me, but I think I might have too.”


End file.
